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The prospects for Ukraine elections

Author of the article:

Ottawa Citizen

Publishing date:

February 25, 2014 • 4 minute read

The scenes coming out of Independence Square in the heart of Kyiv last week looked as though they could have sprung from the Arab Spring. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, has been forced to step down and new elections have been called for May. Many are wondering how long the shaky solution will last.

The current protests represent an attempt to move Ukraine towards western-style development and away from Russian influence and cronyism. However, not all Ukrainians agree with this course. Many in the Russian-speaking east and south support stronger ties with Russia and the rest of its former Soviet republics.

As I watched the images of wafting tear gas and club-yielding riot police in Independence Square over the past several weeks, I was reminded of a similar scene from Pervomaysk in southern Ukraine, a couple of hours drive from Odessa. It was November 2012, a few days after national elections that put the current crop of legislators into parliament.

I was in Ukraine as part of a 500-plus contingent that Canada had sent to observe the parliamentary vote following concerns about the presidential elections that brought Yanukovych into power in 2010. Most of my fellow observers had already returned to Canada but I had been asked to stay on to monitor a couple of places where challenges to the official results had arisen.

Unlike in Canada, where election officials are officially non-partisan, in Ukraine they were chosen by a “lottery” process representing political parties. This allowed for a manipulation of results to favour the party of the president, the Party of Regions. Adding to the skulduggery, fake parties and fake candidates had been created to help ensure skewed results at the ballot box. While the Party of Regions excelled at electoral malfeasance, the main opposition parties also managed to take advantage of the less-than-transparent electoral process.

The term mudslinging doesn’t do justice to the long litany of electoral violations, intimidation and harassment of both voters and candidates. Smear campaigns, party offices destroyed by gun-toting thugs, anonymous letters and gang beatings were common. A leading candidate claimed that his main opponent tried to kill him when a truck appeared out of nowhere late one night running him off the road and sending him to hospital for several days. Stakes were high because many candidates were hoping to get into parliament to gain the immunity from prosecution afforded to all sitting members of parliament.

A candidate in another city told me he had manipulated the results in his riding for $2 million, playing his two main opponents off each other by offering to throw his support behind each of them in exchange for U.S. greenbacks.

Which brings me back to Pervomaysk, where the leading candidate was an opposition member who apparently fled to Moscow two weeks before the election because he feared for his safety.

While it is widely considered that this candidate won the election, the chair of the district election commission reported to Kyiv that his party’s candidate had won. Other commission members refused to sign the official protocols with the tallies, which were locked away in a safe to which only the chair had the key.

A standoff developed between the dissenting members and the chair. Demonstrators showed up on the stairs of the municipal building demanding to see the original protocols and a noisy, rebellious protest ensued. Eventually, riot police moved in and stormed the building to remove the ballots and protocols by court order and take them to Kyiv. The protesters, fearing that the results would be changed on the way to the capital, surrounded the vans carrying the ballots. Special forces were called in, with the scene eerily foreshadowing Independence Square a year later.

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By the time I arrived, the district election commission looked as though it had been through a war. Although the electricity had been cut and the water turned off, the building was swarming with journalists, officials and various hangers-on. I swapped campaign stories with a few of the reporters, including one young journalist from a local TV station.

As the body count began mounting in Kyiv last week, I saw on this young man’s Facebook page that he had given up all pretence of journalism in this latest battle for the heart of Ukrainian democracy. He posted that he was staying put in Independence Square with the other protesters until their demands were met. However, as my former interpreter pointed out as we chatted over Skype on the weekend, “Yanukovych didn’t appear out of a vacuum. This sort of thing will continue to happen until we are able to get past the east-west divide that is ripping the country apart.”

As I heard the announcement of new presidential elections, I thought back to Pervomaysk and all the electoral dirty tricks I encountered when I was in the country. I feared my interpreter was right. The next election is unlikely to bring any peace to Ukraine.

Corey Levine is a human rights and peace-building policy expert, researcher and writer. She spent three months in Ukraine as an electoral observer to their parliamentary elections in 2012.